


well butter my butt and call me a biscuit

by jonphaedrus



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Hicks Is Hicks, Hijinks & Shenanigans, It's The Ironworks What Do You Expect, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 22:07:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30146301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: Nero took a deep breath.Biggs watched, horrified, as Cid grinned.
Relationships: Cid nan Garlond/Nero tol Scaeva
Kudos: 6





	well butter my butt and call me a biscuit

**Author's Note:**

> iirc, written c. 2016, and reposted from tumblr. may have been a request? i genuinely do not remember. prompt was some variety of "nero is an uncultured farm boy confirmed confirmed and i am very southern also confirmed"

Having Nero around underfoot was like sharing his space with a particularly prickly and ill-tempered wet coeurl kitten, but Biggs had also been working for Cid and been friends with Wedge for the better part of a decade. He had gotten used to spending most of his time dodging thrown wrenches and being woken up at half-past four bells in the morning to the sounds of Cid swearing himself blue in the face because he’d stabbed his finger on a wire.

Nero was, on the other hand, totally inscrutable to him. And the more he found out about the man, the more confused Biggs was.

“I thought you said,” he began one afternoon, holding up a large sheet of plating that Cid was currently trying to weld onto another large sheet of plating, the older man currently hanging upside-down with his knees hooked over the railing of the _Excelsior_ and his hair pulled back from his face in a stupid-looking ponytail, his undershirt riding up his torso slightly, “That Nero was a farmer.”

“He is.” Cid replied, rather than question why Biggs was asking, his voice muffled by his welding mask and also by the wrench currently clutched between his teeth.

“He sounds like he’s from the capital.”

“Oh, he affected that accent when we were teenagers.” Cid clanged something suspiciously, and Biggs looked at him. “Oh, shite.” Another clang. “Balls. No, that’s fixable, definitely fixable.” Two more clangs. “Anyway,” Cid continued, like he wasn’t doing...something...where Biggs couldn’t see, something that involved cursing, “You should hear him when he gets mad; it lasts all of about half a sentence before he loses it completely.” Biggs had, apparently erroneously, assumed he’d already heard Nero get angry.

“I’ll...be sure to listen for it?” He settled on at last, not really sure how he was supposed to respond to that, but Cid had completely stopped listening and started clanging more, his blow torch sending off worrying steam.

It smelled oddly charred.

“Chief,” Biggs warned, not even bothering to look because he knew that smell, “Your hair’s on fire again.”

“Oh, for—!”

He got his chance a fortnight later, when something minor exploded.  _Minor_ in the Ironworks was a term that Jessie had defined, four years previously, as anything that was smaller than Wedge. Anything smaller than her was a worrying explosion, and anything the size of Biggs was an emergency.

Today’s unfortunate sacrifice to the Twelve was a half-built ceruleum processor that got a nasty zap from some faulty wiring, and blew up directly in Nero’s pretty face. There was a good deal of fire and smoke, and Wedge getting to do his favourite thing of deploying his fire extinguisher invention (that literally nobody but them  _ever needed_ ) and in the end of it Nero was standing there, face soot-blackened, one eyebrow badly singed, staring at the remains of the project he’d been working on for nearly a full moon.

And then he opened his mouth, just in time for Cid to slide attentively (excitedly?) into the room on a wheely chair, blue eyes bright. “I heard an explosion,” Cid said, with the tone of voice of a man who really does enjoy explosions but has far too few opportunities to make them.

“I spent all damn month on that!” Nero shouted, arms crossed, and then, throwing them in the air, “A month for it to go up in smoke, and nothing to even salvage because now you’ve gone and gotten damn foam all over it!” Wedge did not look in the least bit contrite.

In fact, he sprayed another blast of foam on it. For good measure. Just in case anything was still on fire. (It wasn’t.)

Nero took a deep breath.

Biggs watched, horrified, as Cid grinned.

And then Nero turned on him, like a particularly ill-tempered stormcloud, and the floodgates opened. “You planned this,” he began, “You _absolutely_ planned this, you no-good rotten son of a bastard,” his voice was raising, “Shite-for-brains with _no_ sense of self-preservation working with gods-curst third-rate knockoff shitall components scavenged from out-of-date airships looking at me like your shit don’t stink,” Cid’s grin was growing with every word, and Nero’s fastidious, _tol-_ ranked Tribunus accent was slipping like a second skin, “Trying to get me to _kill_ my damned self as a cobra-spit experiment and I will tell you what, Cidolfus,” oh, he had broken out the full name now, and he was still going, “One of these days so the Emperor help me I am going to take your damn smug self-satisfied smirk and shove it directly into aldogoat shite until you look like you fell out of the ugly tree and hit every damn branch on the way down, because I am not going to have you ruining my pet projects to prove a point, you no-good,” his accent was completely gone now, and he launched into the tail-end of his tirade: “Thrice-curst milk-curdled project-stealing son of a bitch.”

He sounded even more rural than Biggs did. And that was a stretch. His accent had melted completely into rough farmer speak, and Cid was grinning like he had just gotten his nameday presents early.

“But it did work,” he pointed out.

“Yes, it worked!” Nero shouted back, gesturing at the pile of foam and regret that was the modified engine, “Right up until it took one look at its own damn disaster of a self and decided self-imposed spontaneous combustion was the only way out of its unfortunate existence!”  
  
Wedge blasted it with more foam.

“Well, try it again, and then tell me what went wrong!” Cid practically sang it, and Nero, apparently fed up with yelling at the brick wall that was the Chief in a phenomenally good mood, settled for,

“Yelling at you is about as useful as putting tits on a buffalo.”

“Gods,” Biggs said, “You make my grandmother, who hasn’t ever left her farm in her life, sound cultured.”

“Fuck off,” Nero snapped.

Biggs considered that, and then nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted, “All right.”


End file.
